Sentencing Viktor Bout

On Thursday afternoon, Viktor Bout stepped into a Manhattan courtroom for perhaps the last time. Ever since Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Royal Thai Police officers arrested him in Bangkok in March, 2008, Bout, who is forty-five and a Russian citizen, and his lawyers have been fighting, first, extradition to the United States, and then charges for conspiring to sell weapons—including Iglas, Russian-made surface-to-air missiles—to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. (According to the State Department, the FARC, a guerilla outfit involved with drug trafficking, is a terrorist organization.) Bout spent eighteen months in a Thai prison before his extradition. His trial, which I recently wrote about for The New Yorker, was held last fall. In November, he was convicted on all counts: conspiring to kill Americans; conspiring to kill United States federal officers; conspiring to acquire surface-to-air missiles; and conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. The missile charge alone carried a minimum mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life.

Judge Shira Scheindlin, who presided over the case in the Southern District of New York, scheduled Bout’s sentencing for February 8th. But Bout’s lawyer requested a postponement (the first of several), citing the “complexity of the sentencing issues.” The date shifted to March 12th, then March 28th, and, finally, April 5th. Scheindlin’s skepticism towards the government’s case—and specifically its characterization of Bout as an anti-American terrorist-enabler —had been often apparent. In February, she ignored recommendations from both the U.S. attorney’s office and the Bureau of Prisons and ordered Bout out of solitary confinement in the “special housing unit,” and into general prison population. Bout, she said, is a “businessman”: “You may not like the business he is in—but he is a businessman.”

The “business” Bout prospered in was the air-freight industry, transporting a range of cargo. That included lots and lots of weapons shipments, arms that some contend were instrumental in perpetuating conflicts around the world. A British official once dubbed him a “merchant of death.”

Scheindlin received three sentencing reports to review, one from the Bureau of Prisons, one from the prosecution, and one from Bout’s defense, headed by Albert Dayan. The prosecutors recommended a life sentence and twenty million dollars in forfeitures. Some creative mathematics were employed to reach that number. While in Bangkok, Bout told two undercover D.E.A. operatives posing as FARC members that he could supply them with seven to eight hundred Iglas, at a price of$120,000-$180,000 per missile. “Based on a conservative estimate of the quantity (700) and the price ($120,000),” the prosecutors wrote, “the total cost for the surface-to-air missiles that Bout intended to use in connection with the charged offenses was $84 million…Rather than seeking a forfeiture of $84 million, however, the Government requests a money judgment against Bout in the amount of $20 million.” (Last fall, I asked Peter Mirchev, a Bulgarian arms supplier and longtime frind of Bout’s, about the prices Bout quoted. Mirchev laughed. “Too much,” he said. What does an Igla cost? “Realistic? Sixty to eighty thousand euros,” Mirchev replied—or about eighty to a hundred thousand dollars.) Meanwhile, Dayan, Bout’s lawyer, described the case as “odious” and, rather than suggesting an appropriate sentence, he urged the charges be dropped.

Yesterday, according to press reports, the courtroom was packed. (I’m writing from Germany.) Bout previously said that he wouldn’t be “delivering a last word,” because he didn’t want to “turn it all into a show.” He apparently decided otherwise. At one point, insisting on his innocence, he scolded the D.E.A. agents, sitting in the front row, who had built the case against him. “God knows the truth!” Bout said through an interpreter, swivelling to face them. “Let God forgive you. You will answer to him and not me.” Then, as one of the prosecutors, Brendan McGuire, rehashed the evidence, Bout interrupted him and called out in English: “It’s lies.”

Finally, Scheindlin read out her decision: twenty-five years in prison, five years of supervised release, and fifteen million dollars in forfeitures. In terms of prison time, it was as if she only actually sentenced Bout for the missile charge—giving him the absolute minimum—while not adding time for any of the other charges. She said that she took into account that the crime was part of a sting operation; the prosecution, she said, hadn’t proved he would have committed it otherwise.